Everyone at home: rent or download the movie My Name is Kahn. Right now. It’s absolutely necessary.

Taj Mahal and Jaipur Trip (aka the majority of my India experience)

Day One
We had to meet in the union at 3:30am to drive to the airport. I considered just not going to sleep at all, but the schedule was supposed to be packed and I didn’t want to be trying to catch up on sleep. YAY four hours of sleep! Luckily the crew brought in coffee and a few pastries for us.

Our flight from Chennai to New Delhi left at 7am and we landed at 9:30am. We had to wait around in the airport for a while, but we finally met our guide and got on the bus. He told us to call him Anand, which was his last name; I don’t remember his last name because no one used it. Aside from Anand, we had a driver and an assistant named Amin Kahn, on whom my seat mate Lori and I quickly developed a crush.

The first place we visited even before we checked into our hotel was the Victory Tower in New Delhi. The tower is very, very tall and beautiful. It was never redone for tourists, so the only way to get to the top is by making the trek via the stairs. It would have absolutely been worth the effort, but they haven’t let tourists into the tower since the 1980s because a panic triggered a stampede down the cramped stairs and a bunch of people (students, I think) were trampled to death. Anyways, the tower was built by the Afghani Muslim invaders to symbolize their conquer of the native Indian Hindi people. We also found out that the city of Delhi has an intense history. It was destroyed by invaders and rebuilt eight times on almost the exact same location. Old Delhi is the seventh incarnation of Delhi and New Delhi is the eighth and final city.

After the Victory Tower, we had a wonderful Indian buffet lunch at a gorgeous restaurant. One thing I learned about India is that it is green and there are flowers absolutely everywhere! We spent an hour at lunch, and then were brought to our hotel where we were greeted with a glass of chilled fruit juice and got 30 minutes to wash up and rest. We were all exhausted from getting up so early and traveling so far, but when I washed my face and brushed my teeth I felt a lot better. My roommate was Kathleen, which was nice because we’ve known each other the entire trip. We got a kick out of the hotel room. There was a huge window above the bathtub in the bathroom that looked out into the rest of the room…. I’m not sure why it was there, but you had to draw down the shade to use the bathroom… Random, but hilarious.

The next place Anand took us was a big mausoleum made of sandstone that looked a lot like a smaller Taj Mahal. I can’t find the name in my notebook, but I’ll look it up later. The wife of a deceased prince commissioned the building of the mausoleum to honor her late husband’s memory. He was a studying one night at an ancient library when he slipped and fell down the steps to his death. Tragic. His wife hired 300 of the best Arab architects to design the building.

While our guide was giving us the history of the building a group of Indian women and little girls were giggling and staring at us, which we thought was cute, but Anand didn’t like. Throughout the entire trip he was fierce. If any Indian people stopped to talk to us while he was talking, he would yell at them and sometimes chase them away. As a man, he had the authority to chase the women and kids away from us, but they didn’t go far. As soon as Anand gave us a meeting time and set us free to explore I walked over to the group. The kids flocked around me and were really, really excited to pose for pictures. One of the girls even commandeered my camera to snap picture of her mother and friends. I hung out and talked to them for ten minutes or so before wandering off to explore. I hated to tell the smallest girls that I had no chocolate and no gum.

After the mausoleum, we went to see a Ghandi Memorial at sunset. The memorial is a slab of marble engraved with his last words and sporting an eternal flame. Ghandi isn’t buried there because he was cremated and released into the Ganges River, but it was the spot where they had a makeshift wake for him before he was cremated. When he was assassinated, his body was escorted through the streets of Delhi and the procession ended at the location of the memorial. We had to take our shoes off to get close, but that made it feel even more real. The sunset was magical, as most Indian sunsets seem to be. I quickly realized that the setting sun in India looks more like a fiery ball of gas than it does anywhere else I’ve ever watched a sunset. It just looks so much BIGGER and it’s perfectly round and burning blood red, but not too bright to look at.

We ate dinner back at the hotel that night and I called it a night pretty early.

Day Two
Our wake up call came at 4am, though Kathleen and I ignored it and set alarms for 4:45am. We grabbed a quick breakfast at the hotel and were on the bus by 5:15 to leave for the train station. We had a 6am train from New Delhi to Agra over in Rajasthan.

The train station itself was incredible because of the incredibly overwhelming and obvious poverty. Hundreds of homeless Indian people sleep on the beach and it seems like just as many sleep in the train stations. I’m not sure if it’s technically legal, but no one kicks them out, so entire families were curled up under one blanket in the station. I had to step over people who were so accustomed to the noise and commotion that they just kept on sleeping. It was heartbreaking.

Trains in India are notoriously unpredictable and don’t necessarily stick to their schedules, but we got lucky and ours was on time. I read Small Gods on the train, which was a nice distraction from the butterflies in my stomach. We were on out way to the Taj Mahal!

To Be Continued….